skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does a broker have a legal obligation to allow you to purchase any stock? I am genuinely asking as IANAL. I can't go into an Apple Store and demand they sell me a Google Pixel. It seems like these places should have every right to choose what services they offer or products they sell.

I wouldn't do business with Robinhood for a number of reasons that go back before this recent spat of issues, I am just not sure preventing purchasing GME is the worst aspect of this.
I would suggest that the authenticity problem you describe has already been solved by similar systems (Email, XMPP, etc). Nothing wrong with discussing this, of course.
That's a consequence of the UI pattern - when you use the same widget as indicator and input, you need some way to represent "no vote yet" - plus, it would be hard to click/tap "no stars". It could be done better but alas, minimalism is the name of the game.
Throwing this out there, too: assorted government restrictions and lockdowns imposed by regional public health officials. The early ones were more justified because we knew less, but as the pandemic drug on, the burden of proof justifying closures needed to increase, and legislators needed to step up and legitimize the policies. It's like how the president can wage war for 90 days, but then has to get approval from congress.
I guess it's a proof they don't believe it.
Obviously, one needs to be judicious with this.
Most of the other brokerages (Schwab, Etrade, and TD Ameritrade, but NOT Fidelity and Vanguard according to the reports I am getting) are participating. According to the rumor on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassActionRobinHood/comments/l723k... the call came from the White House.
tastyworks went to close-only @ 11:39AM per an email, and opened it back up at 3:12PM today. They blamed Apex clearing, which is the custodian for tastyworks accounts.
Should Robinhood be an arbiter of what is a reasonable trade and what people can spend their money on? Because if so, they have a lot of restricting to do to keep people safe...
I doubt 99% of their users know the account is margin by default. Also on the surface looks like they disabled the option to 'downgrade' to a cash account.

It also seems pretty scummy to not make this very clear that they can sell without asking.

To a normal person this comes off really wrong (and really it is, let's be honest).
Would love to see "trending" stocks that see the greatest increases in popularity over the last 24 hours/ week, etc.
What did you expect? When it is free you are the product. Robinhood uses pay for order flow, a system invented by Bernie Madoof to generate revenue. It is really time to leave this broker.
They will be correlated with BTC/USD
This isn't what happened at all. No one went "Mwah-ha-ha-ha let's put it to the small businesses." What happened is free and pretty good beat more expensive. Microsoft has lost a huge amount of server license revenue to open source.

The open source I've written - be it a program or a patch was always open sourced because I wanted to make my program available to others because I thought it might be useful.
It's probably a liability concern on their part, but they also want people to have money to trade in the future too. If Robinhood users had any chance of actually making a bunch of money on this it would only be in Robhinhoods interest to allow people to continue buying. (if their users have more money in the future they will trade more)
Show HN: WOJO – digital coach for career changers
Hey all,

About 2 years ago my friend and I were going through career changes simultaneously and we started a meetup group for people like us to workshop and discuss common challenges. Within a few months my friend moved from consulting to managing a data team at Amazon Fresh and a few of our meetup members nailed their dream jobs too. During COVID, meetups moved to online and we pivoted to build a digital service WOJO (from: work + mojo).

WOJO makes career change dreams more real and the process less scary. Our algorithm offers a personalised sequence of bite-size tasks allowing users to make incremental progress towards their career goal. Unlike human coaches, WOJO lets you move at your own pace and it is available 24/7, to tackle the problem of lack of time and energy that many career changers have.

Becoming a startup founder is a career change for most of us so hopefully this resonates with a few of you and I could pick your brains on that. What was the most challenging part of your transition into entrepreneurship? What was the best thing you did to tackle this change of professional identity? If you have a minute to try our MVP – does it resonate with the challenges you have been facing in this career change?

Thank you a lot in advance,
Liz
From the small business side, office space in a prime location is super expensive and it would be nice to cut back on that.
I like them laptop style: low-profile, silent, light, slightly tactile.

Haven't tried low profile linear mech ones yet.
In all likelihood the internal teams responsible for risk management and compliance all determined that this was likely criminal activity, and recommended trading restrictions until the SEC weighs in. Brokerages are typically over-cautious about this sort of thing because they do not want to invite additional scrutiny from the powers that be. The brokerages probably did not communicate these decisions to each other, they just all use similar logic and all arrived at similar conclusions. Those that did not make this decision probably did not observe suspicious trading patterns from their customers.
DeFi is a core component of my ETH bull hypothesis. All this decentralized activity requires the purchase of ETH to pay for/transact on.
Other brokers are also blocking buys on different tickers. E-trade prevented me from buying $GME, and looks like they've blocked $AMC buys too.

https://twitter.com/AstralTrading/status/1354884246389874689...
I can confirm that self-hosted is the best of both worlds: fully private and you control the access through your own infrastructure and all works in the browser. This simplicity is important for many small-medium companies. That is why my go-to tools for adhoc data slicing by non-technical users is https://www.metabase.com. I hope that Airbyte/dbt will be the ELT complement. And I hope to find a way to contribute.
More info needed.

If it's closing derivative positions that lack margin, that's their right.

If it's selling share positions because other positions have closed at a loss and the account holder hasn't funded that, that's their right too.

But just selling equities seems illegal and highly unlikely.

Given its a screenshot on twitter, I don't think we can assume it's the latter yet.
I've scanned the lawsuit (https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.553175...). I'm not a lawyer, but my first reading of it is that this is not a strong lawsuit.

The complaint is largely framed around "Robinhood prevented us from executing trades against GME, and it is contractually required to execute all trades." However, the actual contract explicitly says the opposite: Robinhood can choose to limit execution at its own discretion. So in order to win, plaintiffs basically have to get the relevant clauses of the contract to be ruled illegal. The extent to which this is possible is dependent on securities law which I am very unqualified to comment on, although I will note that the complaint does at least include some relevant allegations to what they need to do, which is better than other lawsuits I've seen (oh hi Parler).
Of course it is because that directly affects current holders of the shares. They're closing off the market from people buying the asset these people hold. Sure you can sell, but what does that have to do with the fact they are causing your asset to fall in value due to direct manipulation?

If this wasn't a corrupt rigging to benefit the hedge funds, they wouldn't be doing it.
Well for one thing it's not a file format. For that there's JFIF and EXIF.
Respect Your Power Users
I don't know what the next step is, but the fact that pretty much everyone knows that there will be no jail time despite them openly committing crimes to defraud so many people isn't going to lead us somewhere good.
I consider it a rare pleasure.
It's very difficult for humans to resist putting the burden on someone else. Like that in person meeting that results in a conversation where someone else has been given additional work, or 'needs' to help show someone how to do their job in a spreadsheet... etc.

Remote work forces everyone to contribute to the burden of documenting what's happening.
I forgot to add low-profile to the requirement :)
Eighteen years ago flashmobs were disrupting some retail stores - but I knew they have a potential for more. Now we see flashmobs in the US Senate and then disrupting capital markets. It is funny - but also ... disruptive.

Actually politics has been a part of entertainment for some time already - but I don't like it like that and I am afraid capital markets will also be worse.
blocking options calls from account that can't cover the position: good, probably saved people from getting into debt

blocking purchases of shares from accounts that have enough to cover the contract: highly sketchy and worthy of deep scrutiny

some broker did 1, some did 2, but form screenshots alone is hard to tell which did which
Exactly, “wall st” as a whole is making bank off this volatility, as well as Blackrock and Fidelity finds. The real way to actually stick it to wall st would be if all of main st sold all their equities..
Ahh, are you in Quebec?

> landlords are allowed to evict if they do sufficient improvements to the property

This is a REALLY unusual provision in rent stabilization laws in the US and as far as I know the EU which normally don't allow evictions like this and severely cap rent increases for improvements.

If you are in Quebec, the RDL is really unique as a form of rent control in that it doesn't set prices or cap increases but rather acts as an arbiter for rent increase disputes. I understand that there are some local criticisms of the system, but I'm not very well versed on the subject.

I think most HN comments about rent control are referring the type that exists in SF where prices are more or less locked in place or otherwise set by the government.
Agreed. I watch at least one segment of theirs pretty much every single day. I don't always care about some of the things they cover (especially the when they're criticizing something someone said in Congress), and sometimes I don't fully agree with their takes on things, but overall they're great.
And Drupal 7. What is old is new again. Laravel has also joined in on this train.

But from what I remember ... I hated this technology with a burning passion back when I was still working on D7.
> Twitter has a de facto monopoly on things that work exactly like Twitter.

No, Twitter has a monopoly on people who use Twitter. If you decoupled the users from the technology (e.g., by way of some common protocol that allows human communication networks to span social media platforms), Twitter would probably vanish overnight (surely losing out to a competitor with an "edit" button).

> Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019

In what world is it okay for one company to monopolize much of the communication of 22% of Americans? Especially since Twitter isn't some neatly isolated system, but rather its effects spill over into the outside world; consider how often traditional media cites Twitter (not only with respect to Trump's own Tweets) or even Twitter's role in BLM protests/riots and the Capitol Hill riot. Twitter's reach pretty clearly far exceeds its own user base.

Moreover, Twitter and other social media giants often act in concert, so it's not "just Twitter" or "just Facebook" that we need to be concerned about, but also these giants acting in their mutual interests.
Parler
(deplatforming, service)
|
|
Discord
(deplatforming, WSB)
|
|
Robin Hood
(functional ban, WSB)

There similarities are not perfect, but enough to draw an analogy.
If a dev releases an update that breaks the app or fundamentally alters the behavior of the app, why should users not be allowed to offer an updated rating based on those changes. If ratings are due to some recent change, then of course it will naturally look like a swarm. Nothing nefarious about it. Any kind of artificial disruption of the users being allowed to post their review is artificially protecting the dev.
> Free speech is only free if we allow all of it.

I am quite happy to see various platforms take on blocking commercial spam - this might be in their own interests (since they want to sell off the right to advertise rather than have people independently leverage their platform to spread advertising but I think it's fair to say that nearly no one wants completely unlimited speech.

I don't believe that the NYT should be required to print my novel into every sunday edition of their paper even if they do choose to print some letters to the editor - they have the right to choose what to print. A similar parallel was fax-vertising, where you send unsolicited faxes to random numbers in the hope that someone reads your flier and decides they want your services. Back in the day fax-vertising would result in a lot of paper waste since the fax would be instantly printed out, in the modern world people tend to screen incoming faxes, but it is still a problem... Your unlimited speech is causing someone to waste paper and ink to pay the cost of expressing your speech.

When it comes to digital information the cost goes way down and I agree that in this case the actions of social media platforms are pretty despicable but in all things we need to have balance.

(Also, please don't open up a statement by calling your detractors neoliberal facists - this isn't reddit)
Yeah but if I see 0 stars the result is that I'm assuming that there were no votes.
GitHub allows you to customize what kind of issues your project accepts [1]. Did you ever try setting up an issue template for bugs only? I'm considering doing that for my own project and I hope it will be effective.

[1] https://github.com/github/hub/issues/new/choose
Apple has total control over the largest computing platform in the United States. Timmy could fix this in many ways if he really cared.
Decentralized version, as that was also taken down:

https://d.tube/#!/v/qwewerrty123123asdzc/QmaPHajW8GKmYGqGZC5...
The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships
Are they entitled to prevent people from buying the shares you hold? If people can't buy them, this obviously causes the price to fall. They are making the price of what you hold fall...they deserve to be sued good and hard for this.
Our service runs multi-region active across 3 regions. We can survive a 2 region outage and still operate successfully.
It would seem Google should remove the app from the store since it does not do what it claims to do.

An app claiming to be a stock trading app that doesn't allow trades for a NASDAQ listed stock isn't really a stock trading app.
I hope that these events make more people put their savings and time into their own projects instead of bitcoin and stocks.
Wow, guess I live in and being booted from the USA without me even knowing it now... IMO living is all about compromises, that way we all benefit from it as a society. But clearly not by being ignorant.
Wine and Cheese Pairs Visualization
It's not necessarily free https://robinhood.com/us/en/about/gold/
It is super risky, but there's a definite path to profit here: the short-sellers sold too much stock. 140% of the shares, it appears, which means shares were borrowed, sold, and then borrowed from the buyer it was sold to and sold again. And when all those shorts run out, the short-sellers need to have bought shares back again. With share prices this high, they're going to have to pay a lot of money for them, and people holding shares could make a ton of profit.

But it's definitely risky. You could lose a lot of money. Many of the people buying are also doing it to stick it to the hedge funds and give them a taste of their own medicine.
The lowest possible price is also the point where the value of your portfolio is lowest and the margin call is most severe. It is completely normal for brokers to immediately close positions when you are highly leveraged and the market is moving quickly on a direction which might leave your portfolio at a negative value - they don't want to be left holding the bag if you take too long to respond. Generally your broker will only give you time to correct things when volatility is low enough that things won't change over the next few hours.
I'm learning recently to be a lot more critical about this sort of thing than I used to be.
B-but what if people say mean things? :/
Citadel is RobinHood’s biggest customer - they pay RH for order flow from “unsophisticated” investors.

Citadel also owns a non-controlling interest in Melvin capital, a hedge fund that is/was massively short GME. Citadel gave them $2.7 billion earlier this week.

It seems very likely that Citadel pressured RobinHood to stop all purchases so that Citadel’s investment is secure.

There are additional rumors that Citadel went short GME right before the brokers stopped allowing people to buy, only allowing them to sell.
Nothing in that regulation stipulates that a broker must provide access to a market in any (and therefore every) security. Specifically, it refers to any transaction Clearly, a transaction can't occur unless the broker agrees they will provide that security for trade.

As to your second point, it would not be in a broker's best interest to change access to certain securities 'willy nilly' as they will lose business and clients. Whap happened today was not an arbitrary decision.

Would you be arguing if these brokers raised the margin requirement on Gamestop, etc to 99%? That is within their rights to do so, the SEC only sets a regulatory minimum margin req, not (to the best of my knowledge) a maximum.

People seem to forget that many people "trading" Gamestop and the like are doing so on margin. As such, the broker dealer has financial risk that you will not be able to pay your loan back, ie by a close out of positions. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to expect that the eventual decline in these stocks will be rapid with sizable gaps? How many of the Robinhood traders are going to cry bloody murder when they are automatically closed out 10s, perhaps a hundred points lower from when the call was triggered?
Realistically though nothing at this moment can supplant gmail without people willing to move away from gmail. They make it hard for people to do their own thing because they spam filter out legitimate email coming from domains that they don't like.
In my experience—unless your comment is particularly helpful—starting a comment with “I will be downvoted for this” is only fishing for more downvotes then you’d otherwise get. This holds true on most internet forums I’ve visited.
Lemmy is Mastodon for Reddit, so it lets you have a instance with a set of subreddits, basically, from a user can also subscribe to other instances' subreddits. I'm not involved with the code or anything, I just think it's neat. https://lemmy.ml
I completely disagree that cracks are showing and I think you used two very weak examples in CentOS and Elastic.

These were and always have been losing bets. Elastic has always bemoaned being open source, so everyone should have seen that coming. And CentOS died when they were bought by RHEL. Anyone who put their weight into these programs after those red flags went up were taking a risk.

And that's exactly why OSS is not cracking. Not even close. So CentOS and Elastic aren't open source anymore. Who cares. "But my workflow! How will I do xxx or yyy now?"

Do what you did before CentOS and Elastic. Find an open source alternative. If there aren't any and it's important enough make your own. The world will go on people.

Just like Gitlab jacking the price. They want you to assume that your choices are to either pay more or go without source control. It's up to you to be smart enough to say "I'll just find another source management solution that fits my budget."
What they should have done was position it as a
premium games machine that included a "free" DVD player.

I can't agree with this at all.

They would have been an utter nobody with zero history and zero name recognition going up against the absolute titans of the gaming industry with decades of experience, consumer brand recognition, and developer relations.

When you are fighting a superior foe, frontal assaults don't work.

Now, in Nuon's case... the non-frontal assault didn't work either. But it was probably their only shot and it might have worked if they could have made it to market sooner.
Nothing fatal ...yet? =)

The software is beta level at best, they HAD to get it out to pump up their 2020 numbers.
The Rules that Govern the Upcoming Flood of Android Gambling Apps
"The rules which govern the no-doubt upcoming flood of gambling apps on Android are available here. they’re painfully short on details."

See also:

- https://thecrow.uk/fancy-a-flutter-google-allows-real-money-...
Yes, Vanguard supports individual stocks with no trading fees.
I'm with Ally bank and right now they're telling people that it's their clearing firm (Apex Clearing Corp) that's blocking buys of GME and some other stocks.

Could it be that other trading platforms use the same clearing firm?
"Does a broker have a legal obligation to allow you to purchase any stock?"

No, I have seen all sorts of seemingly arbitrary restrictions since I started investing (back in college), on everything from mutual funds to ETPs to penny stocks.
let's try and keep this in perspective and avoid jumping to wild conclusions based on someone tweeting a screen shot.

First, Robinhood does not make the market or fulfill the orders, so if their market-maker has no one selling a stock they have little option other than stopping people from making purchase orders. You need both sides for a liquid market.

Second, IF these are margin positions then it is not only allowed and legal but also typical for the broker lending on margin to close out the position unilaterally. IF these are cash positions it is a completely different story.
> Citadel then buys the shares on the market, and sells them to Robinhood for a slight markup

This would be front running and is fundamentally not how citadel or other MM function.
Musk Says SpaceX Waiting on FAA Approval for SN-9 Hop
French Web Dev Community
Many trading platforms still allow trading. And there's no real reason not to, except to protect the hedge funds that fucked up.

Edit: And I just found out my platform (Binck) doesn't accept trades anymore.

Edit: Apparently they do accept trades, but only if your limit is close to the current price. I was increasing mine because it wasn't executing at the lower price. Eventually I did get in at the lower price. We'll see where this goes.
There should probably be some type of sentiment analysis on this as simply being talked about isn't always a good sign. However it would probably need to be customized specifically to WSB since they have their own language and terminology.
212 did this aswell.
Law loopholes can be hard to diagnose and fix.
Rick Rubin, legendary record producer, on the mysteries of the creative process
There is zero chance they all independently came to the same conclusion at the exact same time. There has to be a bare minimum amount of coordination involved, which is likely illegal. Either that or they got an order from the SEC/White House.
Cartels... It's got Anti-Trust written all over it. Not sure the US will do much though.

Jesus, it kind of shows how corrupt the US really is. We're all basically watching a bunch of people commit crimes that from my quick Google carries a max sentence of 10 years with billons of dollars on the line and we're all pretty sure they're going to get away with it.

Though, I do think if Biden makes sure the justice hammer comes down on this, it'll win over a bunch of Trump supporters.